Waterloo.AI Seminars | Waterloo Data and Artificial Intelligence Institute

Waterloo.AI hosts monthly seminar series to foster discussion and collaboration around active topics of AI research at the University of Waterloo. Each seminar includes a talk by a guest speaker audience discussion, and a following reception with light refreshments for further discussion and networking. Please click the topic links for details. Past seminar recordings are available on YouTube.

Upcoming Seminars

Date	Time	Location	Speaker	Topic
Tuesday, April 29, 2025	2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT	DC 1304	Mathias Lecuyer	Adversarial Robustness and Privacy Measurements using Hypothesis-tests
Monday, May 12, 2025	10:30 AM - 11:30 AM EDT	DC 1302	Thomas Haigh	Where the Database Management System Comes From, and Why it Matters
Tuesday, May 13, 2025	10:30 AM - 11:30 AM EDT	DC 1304	Thomas Haigh	Artificial Intelligence: The Brand That Wouldn’t Die

Promote Your AI Seminar with Waterloo.AI

Are you hosting an AI-focused seminar and want to expand its reach?

Submit your event details using this form, and we’ll help promote it through Waterloo.AI’s established channels. Once submitted, our team will review your request and share your event across relevant platforms, including the Waterloo.AI website, newsletter, and social media. Thank you for contributing to the vibrant AI research community at Waterloo!

Past Seminars

Winter 2025

Date	Speaker	Topic
Wednesday, March 5, 2025	Stefanus Jasin	Revenue Management Meets Inventory Management
Wednesday, March 5, 2025	Neel Sundaresan and Michael Kwok	The Postmodern Shift: Generative and Agentic AI in Software Development
Thursday, March 6, 2025	Marc Lanctot	Mastering Board Games by External and Internal Planning with Language Models
Thursday, March 6, 2025	Eva Dyer	Scaling Up Neural Data Pretraining to Uncover Shared Structure in Brain Function
Thursday, March 13, 2025	Jon Stokes	How should we use AI for antibiotic discovery
Thursday, April 3, 2025	V.S. Subrahmanian	Securing the World with AI – Some Adventures

Fall 2024

Date	Speaker	Topic
Monday, December 9, 2024	Amrit Singh Bedi	Tuning Free (Inference Time) Alignment of Large Language Models
Monday, December 2, 2024	Siva Reddy	Unlocking Complex Reasoning With Generative Models
Thursday, November 28, 2024	Sophia Yun-Hsuan Lien	Bridging the Reality Gap in Reinforcement Learning: Robust Algorithms and Techniques for Practical Applications
Friday, October 18, 2024	Agustinus Kristiadi	Probabilistic Inference and Decision-Making with Foundation Models for Bayesian Optimization

Spring 2024

Date	Speaker	Topic	Youtube Recordings
Friday, July 19, 2024	Dr. Arka Roy	Uncertainty Management in Radiotherapy via AI & Optimization	N/A
Thursday, June 13th, 2024	Elliot Creager	To Build AI that works for everyone, Adapt Models and Coordinate Data
Thursday, May 30th, 2024	Dr. Amir-Hossien Karimi	Towards Trustworthy Human-Machine Collaboration	N/A

Winter 2024

Date	Speaker	Topic
February 2, 2024	Dr. Kevin He	Learning from Viral Content
February 21, 2024	Dr. Max Li	Uncertainties in the Airspace
March 4th, 2024	Saber Jafarpour	Safety Assurance in Learning-enabled Autonomous Systems
March 6th, 2024	Jana Pavlasek	Think Graphical Act Local
March 7th, 2024	Jun Gao	Generative AI for 3D Content
March 11th, 2024	Dr. Jeremy Wang	Ribbit — Canada's first autonomous airplane and R&D platform
March 12th, 2024	Krikamol Muandet	Towards Imprecise Generalisation
March 20, 2024	Roya Fallah Firoozi	Safe Robot Autonomy
March 27th, 2024	Lunjia Hu	Mathematical Foundations for Trustworthy Machine Learning
April 1st, 2024	Sarah Cen	Paths to AI Accountability
April 3rd, 2024	Misha Khodak	The Long Tail of AI
April 12th, 2024	Adam Dziedzic	Private Prompt Learning for LLM
April 12th, 2024	Franziska Boenisch	Individualized Privacy and Memorization in Machine Learning Models

Fall 2023

Date	Speaker	Topic
Dec. 5^th, 2023	Prof. Apurva Narayan	Improving Resilience and Trust in AI Driven Cyber Physical Systems
Nov. 24^th, 2023	Prof. Han Zhao	Fair and Optimal Prediction via Post-Processing
Nov. 2^nd, 2023	Prof. Lila Kari	Machine Learning for Biodiversity Informatics
Sept. 18^th, 2023	Prof. Mo Chen	Interpretable Reinforcement Learning through Control and Human-Robot Interactions

Spring 2023

Date	Speaker	Topic
July. 21st, 2023	Prof. Baoxiang Wang	Information Design in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
July. 7th, 2023	Prof. Lili Mou	Modelling Uncertainty in Text Generation
June. 6th, 2023	Prof. Gennaro Notomista	Learning to Execute Prioritized Stacks of Robotic Tasks
May. 10th, 2023	Dr. Prashant Doshi	Fully Decentralized RL in Complex Multi-Agent Settings

Fall 2022

Date	Speaker	Topic
Dec.8th, 2022	Dr. Ali Ayub	Long-term Real World Autonomy Assistance for Assistive Robots
Nov. 10th, 2022	Boris Ivanovic Research Scientist in Nvidia's Autonomous Vehicle Research Group	Effectively Integrating Behavior Prediction within the Modern Robotic Autonomy Stack
Oct. 13th, 2022	Prof. Abbas Houssam, Oregon State University	Logic-Based Computational Ethics for Autonomous Agents
Sept. 8th, 2022	Dr. Radoslav Ivanov	Safe autonomy within reach: a verified machine learning and control perspectiv

SPRING 2022

Date	Speaker	Topic
July 14th, 2022	Alexander Terenin	Pathwise Conditioning of Gaussian Processes
Jun. 23, 2022	Priyank Jaini, Research Scientist at Google	Exploiting Symmetries for Probabilistic Generative Modelling
Jun. 2, 2022	Prof. Oliver Schulte, Simon Fraser University	Valuing Hockey Actions and Ranking Players With Reinforcement Learning
May 26, 2022	Greg Yang, Senior Researcher at Microsoft	Tuning GPT-3 on a Single GPU via Zero-Shot Hyperparameter Transfer
May 12, 2022	Dr. Adam Wagner, Postdoc at Tel Aviv University	A simple RL setup to find counterexamples to open conjectures in mathematics

WINTER 2022

Date	Speaker	Topic
Mar. 17, 2022	Prof. Dorsa Sadigh	Learning from Non-Traditional Souces of Data
Mar. 3, 2022	Prof. Jackie C. K. Cheung	Keeping Track of Entities Over Time, Minds, and Knowledge Sources
Feb. 3, 2022	Prof. Martha White	Developing Reinforcement Learning Agents that Learn Many Subtasks

FALL 2021

Date	Speaker	Topic	Youtube Recordings
Nov. 9, 2021	Prof. Elias Khalil	Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Combinatorial Optimization: The Case of Bipartite Matching

SPRING 2021

Date	Speaker	Topic	Youtube Recordings
May 18, 2021	Prof. Katja Mombaur	Embodied intelligence for human-centred robots - Combining model-based optimization with model-free methods

WINTER 2021

Date	Speaker	Topic
Apr. 20, 2021	Animesh Garg	Building blocks of Generalizable Autonomy in Robotics
Apr. 6, 2021	Andreas Loukas	Erdos Goes Neural: an Unsupervised Learning Framework for Combinatorial Optimization on Graphs
Mar. 9, 2021	Dr. Thomas Dietterich	Providing Prospective Guarantees on the Performance of MDP Policies
Jan. 12, 2021	Dr. Mark Riedl	T he Quest for Automated Story Generation

FALL 2020

Date	Speaker	Topic
Dec. 1, 2020	Prof. Graham Taylor	Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks: Iterative Generation and Holistic Evaluation
Nov. 19, 2020	Prof. Peter van Beek, Prof. Hamid Tizhoosh, Prof. Kate Larson, Prof. Wayne Chang, Kevin Tuer (Communitech), & Prof. Charles Clarke	AI for Managers and Executives - Webinar Series Pt.3 - Preparing Your Organization to Leverage AI at Scale
Nov. 5, 2020	Prof. Peter van Beek, Prof. Wayne Chang & Prof. Pascal Poupart Graduate Students: Stefanie Bruinsma, Esteban Veintimalla & Cristen Brown	AI for Managers and Executives - Webinar Series Pt. 2 - From the Lab to Production
Nov. 3, 2020	Dr. Emtiyaz Khan	Towards Life-Long Deep Learning with Bayes
Oct. 29, 2020	Prof. Vijay Ganesh	Machine Learning and Logic Solvers: The Next Frontier
Oct. 22, 2020	Prof. Fakhri Karray & Prof. Hamid Tizhoosh	AI for Managers and Executives - Webinar Series Pt. 1 - Separating Fact From Fiction
Oct. 6, 2020	Prof. Taylor	Reinforcement learning in the real world - how to "cheat" and still feel good about it
Sept. 15, 2020	Dr. Ashkan Sami	Dependability and Security and How to Improve Both at the Same Time

WINTER 2020

Date	Speaker	Topic
Jan. 17, 2020	Ryan Smith	Emotion-cognition Interactions as Deep Active Inference
Jan. 10, 2020	Roger Melko	Designing a quantum computer with generative models

FALL 2019

*Date*	Speaker	Topic
Dec. 6, 2019	Qiang Liu	Recent Applications of Stein's Method in Machine Learning
Dec. 5, 2019	Kristian Kersting	Deep Machines That Know When They Do not Know
Nov. 22, 2019	Paul Hebert	Progress Towards Planetary Biosurveillance
Nov. 8, 2019	Chris Eliasmith	Spiking Neural Networks for More Efficient AI Algorithms
Oct. 4, 2019	Pascal Poupart	Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Sept. 12, 2019	Mark Crowley	Artificial Intelligence on Fire!

SPRING 2019

Date	Speaker	Topic
Jul. 30, 2019	Kimon Fountoulakis	Local Graph Clustering
May 28, 2019	Shai Ben-David	Unsupervised learning; what can, what can't and what should not be done

WINTER 2019

Date	Speaker	Topic
Apr. 29, 2019	Kerstin Dautenhahn	Human-robot interaction: Challenges and Opportunities
Mar. 25, 2019	Seyed Majid Zahedi	Game-Theoretic Approach to Resource Management in Computer Systems
Mar. 1, 2019	Amir Shabani	Human-centered Intelligent Systems
Feb. 25, 2019	Khalid Al-Kofahi	AI and ML at Thomson Reuters
Jan. 28, 2019	Yuri Boykov	Reconstructing Whole Vessel-tree: Challenges, Geometric Priors, and Optimization
Jan. 25, 2019	Xiao-Ping Zhang	Multimedia Machine Learning/AI for Multimedia Content Analysis

FALL 2018

Date	Speaker	Topic
Nov. 26, 2018	Robin Cohen	Trust modelling in multiagent systems: a look back and a look ahead
Oct. 29, 2018	Vijay Ganesh	Machine Learning for SAT Solvers
Sept. 24, 2018	Hamid Tizhoosh	Artificial Intelligence - History, Opportunities and Challenges

Organizing committee

Prof. Pascal Poupart

David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Faculty of Mathematics

Dr. Yash Vardhan Pant

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.